And You Will Know Us From The Trailer Of Our Fest – Hardcore patrons of the SFIFF often get on familiar terms with the sponsorship trailer shown before all the screenings and programs. After several viewings of the same stills and credit scroll, you start to notice things, like how right-hand column speeds up towards the end when the technical credits show up. Then again, maybe that’s just me. But have you noticed how the trailer’s music ends on a high note — literally? The ringing tone jumps an octave and then lingers in reverberation as the screen shows “San Francisco Film Society.” I’ve heard a couple people complain about it. So if you’re a Super Hearer, fair warning: cover your ears if the trailer music seems loud..

Head’s up: A scene from Julia Loktev’s THE LONELIEST PLANET. Courtesy of San Francisco Film Society.

Remove your hats, please – The three main characters in Julia Loktev‘s The Loneliest Planet usually aren’t wearing hats or sunglasses, which is something that sticks out in a movie where three people spend so much time on a long cross-country hiking and camping trip. Hikers usually bring that stuff along, but onscreen those things would obscure the emotions on the actor’s faces, not to mention their magnificent heads, which deserve attention:

Gael García Bernal‘s indie-idol mop-top is on full display, and we need to see that dark brown hair together with those blue eyes. Covering it with some practical hiking hat would be an justice.

Hani Furstenberg‘s fiery red tresses really pop against the slate grey and brilliant greens of the Georgian (the republic, not the US state) landscape. The camera loves her hair and spends a good amount of time looking at it.

Bidzina Gujabidze‘s dome is the most intriguing of the three. The topography of his scalp is remarkable, with furrows, ripples and valleys. Gujabidze is a real-life mountaineering guide, very famous in his native country — director Loktev said he always gets stopped on the streets by fans.

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– Robot & Frank, the crowd-pleaser from Berkeley High and NYU grad director Jake Schreier, was filmed in Pearl River, NY. Good to see upstate NY represented.

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Is that a scarf around your neck or are you just happy to see me? – I didn’t really know much about computer animator David OReilly (sic) before last night’s program David OReilly Says Something, but I’m glad I went. His graphics are pretty unique and he rewards short attention spans with quick-hit blasts of visual jokes or surreal and bizarre scenarios — perfect for the internet consumer. In fact, the young Irish illustrator/animator/renderer mentioned during his onstage interview with Film Society’s programmer Sean Uyehara that he all his notable stuff was made for the internet, and seeing it on the largest screen at the Kabuki was a unique and occasionally weird experience.

There was much discussion about the viral nature of his stuff, like this video he posted in the early days of the iPhone, which demonstrated something he called iHologram, a (fake) app.

He created it using his animation and graphics skills, but it’s so convincing that many understandably though it was real. (Many also said “Fake!” — not everyone was duped.) OReilly said there’s an art professor somewhere offering a class where students create imaginary apps with the idea that the unfettered imagination displayed therein will inspire actual programmers to make those apps.

David and Sean also talked about the 3D-rendered head of Walt Disney that OReilly released into the Creative Commons and which launched a lot of user-inspired variations, including this statuette showing Walt with a “scarf penis,” a super long manhood appendage that ropes up and around the man’s shoulder.

A very poor photograph of the statue of Walt Disney with his “scarf penis.”

And here’s David OReilly’s Please Say Something, which was shown last night on a MUCH bigger screen: